Self-Evolving Agentic Image Restoration via Deliberate Planning and Intuitive Execution

Real-world image restoration (IR) remains challenging due to complex and coupled degradations. While recent agentic IR frameworks leverage Large Language Models for flexible tool planning, they face two critical limitations. First, from a search scheme perspective, excessive reliance on greedy strategies fails to balance exploration and exploitation. Second, existing agentic systems underutilize information, exhibiting episodic amnesia. To address these challenges, we propose $\mathbf{\text{Self-Evolving}}\mathbf{\text{Agentic}}\mathbf{\text{Image}}\mathbf{\text{Restoration}}\mathbf{\text{(SEAR)}}$, which formulates restoration as a sequential decision-making problem. Inspired by the dual-process theory, SEAR comprises an Intuitive Executor and a Deliberate Planner, respectively following the fast-thinking $\mathit{\text{System}}\mathit{\text{1}}$ and slow-thinking $\mathit{\text{System}}\mathit{\text{2}}$ principles. The Deliberate Planner employs Pruning-Aware Monte Carlo Tree Search for long-horizon reasoning, utilizing a hybrid no-reference reward and a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based tournament to prevent metric exploitation. Complementarily, the Intuitive Executor leverages a self-evolving episodic memory indexed by degradation-aware state fingerprints. This mechanism distills expensive search trajectories into adaptive expertise, overcoming episodic amnesia while progressively amortizing cold-start exploration costs through memory reuse. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate its strong perceptual and quantitative performance.